David Dastmalchians dark side in Late Night with the Devil

TORONTO — If ever someone were born to play a vampire, it’s David Dastmalchian, who opens the door to his temporary Edwardian-style home looking like a steampunk Nosferatu. Black linen duster. Chipped black nail polish. Black hair swept skyward from that angular, haunting face you’ll recognize from dozens of small but memorable movie roles.

Dracula socks. Okay, maybe that one’s a little too on the nose.

Had the star of the horror-comedy hit “Late Night With the Devil” — a found-footage flick about a ’70s talk show host who opens a door to hell on live TV — dressed on theme? “No, no, no, this is just David,” he says, laughing.

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Dastmalchian is in the midst of what he describes as “one of the most, if not the most, resoundingly incredible and rewarding professional years of my career.” The night of the Oscars, he was in Los Angeles celebrating the triumphant “Oppenheimer” (he plays William Borden, who wrote a letter to the FBI accusing the titular physicist of being a Soviet agent). By 5 a.m., he was on a plane to Toronto to start filming a central role as a hacker in “Murderbot,” a sci-fi series for Apple TV Plus starring Alexander Skarsgård as an android. And three days after that, he was in New York to open “Late Night With the Devil,” a collaboration with Australian directors Cameron and Colin Cairnes and Dastmalchian’s first leading role in a movie he didn’t write. It became an out-0f-nowhere mainstream hit, selling out multiplexes, earning an eerie $666,666 its first Sunday in theaters and recording the best-ever opening weekend for its distributor, IFC Films.

Dastmalchian plays Jack Delroy, a wannabe Johnny Carson who’s made an unfortunate deal with the occult in a desperate effort to raise his show’s ratings. The entire movie takes place over a single disastrous, and gruesomely funny, Halloween broadcast featuring a parapsychologist working with a teenage girl possessed by a demon.

Stephen King declared it “absolutely brilliant.” It’s since made $11.1 million on a $3 million budget, with positive reviews from horror and mainstream critics alike. (It’s still in theaters and, in mid-April, became the highest-watched debut in the history of the horror streaming service Shudder.)

LATE NIGHT WITH THE DEVIL: I got a screener. It's absolutely brilliant. I couldn't take my eyes off it. Your results may vary, as they say, but I urge you to watch it when you can.

In many ways, this feels like the start of a new chapter for Dastmalchian, 48, who seems poised to become the new king of horror — a go-to actor for fright films in the vein of Vincent Price, Lon Chaney Jr., Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff.

“What made Vincent Price so special was that he took the genre seriously and he acted so intensely and beautifully and I think he recognized that the genre can be a way of expressing very human experiences … like grief and trauma,” says Sam Zimmerman, Shudder’s vice president of programming. “And David reminds me of that.”

What separates Dastmalchian from his cohort, beyond his soulful performances, are those striking looks that have led to an impressive career of playing creeps. “I have a love-hate relationship with my face,” Dastmalchian says, fiddling with a water bottle adorned with stickers of the Bride of Frankenstein and Taylor Swift (courtesy of his wife and daughter; he also has a son). “I’m not going to be a matinee idol. And that’s okay.”

You may remember him as a paranoid schizophrenic acolyte of the Joker in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight.” Tortured superhero Polka-Dot Man in “The Suicide Squad.” Pompadoured Russian cybercriminal Kurt in “Ant-Man.” And a favorite of director Denis Villeneuve, who’s killed him off brutally in three films: as a suspected child-abductor in “Prisoners”; a quickly dispatched morgue worker in “Blade Runner 2049”; and bald, red-lipped psychopath Piter de Vries, henchman to Stellan Skarsgård’s Baron Harkonnen in “Dune.”

Villeneuve has joked that Dastmalchian is the first person he thinks of when he has a character who needs to die a miserable death and calls him “an incredibly versatile and tremendously inspiring artist.” The director first noticed him in “The Dark Knight,” and says by email, “I’m fascinated by his range and by the mad poetry he brings on screen.”

It’s in horror, though, that a respected character actor like Dastmalchian, often cast as a bone-chilling sadist, can become a leading man.

I’m not sure there’s anyone like David circulating at the moment,” says Phil Nobile Jr., editor in chief of Fangoria. “No one looks like David, no one sounds like David. And I think horror fans are taken in because they just recognize him as one of their own.”

Thirty years ago, Nobile explains, horror was considered a ghetto that legitimate actors had to claw themselves out of. It’s a sector of the industry that prints money by casting faceless (read: cheap) unknowns because, well, they usually all die by the end.

But Dastmalchian has turned more toward horror as he’s risen in prominence. He was the whistling marauder in “Bird Box” and, just before “Late Night,” could be seen in 2023’s “Boogeyman,” a Stephen King adaptation, and “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” as a sailor aboard a notoriously doomed 1897 merchant ship from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” He’s also started a production company, Good Fiend Films, geared toward creating fun, quality genre fare, which he used to help produce “Late Night.”

Dastmalchian — whose wedding ring features a carved skull and crossbones — has always gravitated toward the spooky and the gruesome. For the past three years, he’s hosted horror’s equivalent of the Oscars, the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards. He’s also the author of “Count Crowley,” a comic book about a female vampire hunter. He even became a brand ambassador for Titan Caskets (“At Titan Caskets we have an obvious interest in you dying, but we can wait”).

Even his social life is horror-tastic. He met his close friend Trent Reznor at a haunted house, and now they do board game nights together with their families. While in Toronto, he’s been hanging out with the cast from the vampire mockumentary series “What We Do in the Shadows.”

Dastmalchian jokes that it’s all part of his master plan to keep making horror films just to see “if I can get a shot someday at Dracula, because they keep putting me in vampire films and then not letting me be the f---ing vampire! I’m always fighting Dracula or getting killed by him. It makes no sense!”

As the youngest kid of an evangelical family in Kansas City, Kan., he wrestled from an early age with what he now understands was untreated anxiety, depression and suicidal ideation, much of it exacerbated by the bitter divorce of his parents — his father, an Iranian immigrant, was an engineer, and his mother, who could trace her ancestry to the Mayflower, worked in education. At school, he was bullied relentlessly for having vitiligo. (Kids called him “polka-dot,” which would give him unique empathy for the doomed superhero he’d later play.)

Comic books were an escape, while horror was a natural fascination, given the constant talk in their deeply religious household about the afterlife and the watchful eyes of the dead.

“Monsters were always my favorite thing,” he says. “It drove my mother crazy because horror was considered so evil.” He’d secretly check out slasher movies with his older siblings and, on Friday nights, watch a local fright fest, “Crematia’s Friday Nightmare.”

“What I love about [horror] is that, if it’s done properly, it fills the audience with so many physical, visceral experiences. … I think it helps us look down the barrel of the inevitable in a way that feels healthy, and it gives storytellers a way to wrestle with really pointed questions, like what happens when you don’t deal with grief?”

By high school, he was playing the part of a well-adjusted football player dabbling in theater on the side, even as suicidal thoughts crept into everything he did. On a different timeline, he would have gone to a Division II school on a sports scholarship. But he followed a “wild, crazy dream” to audition for the theater conservatory at DePaul University in Chicago and got a scholarship there instead.

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Then, at 19, he tried heroin while hanging out with some musician friends he admired.

“It was the first time everything made sense,” he says. “It was the first time all the pain was just gone. … I was just surrounded by complete bliss.”

He thought drugs could help him create art like his hero William S. Burroughs, whom he, coincidentally, met around the time he started using and took as a sign he was on the right path. Instead, he says, “out of theater school it went right to full-time junkie and pretty quickly into homelessness.” He’d sleep in his car, shoplift, run scams where he’d raid gift tables at weddings and sell the spoils at pawnshops. At one point he was running small quantities of heroin down from Chicago into areas south of the Ozarks and taking meth back. He narrowly survived multiple serious suicide attempts and had to be institutionalized twice.

He sometimes still can’t believe he made it out. “I like the term ‘miracle,’” he says. “And I’m just filled with an ocean of gratitude.”

The doorbell rings.

After a brief conversation with the person at the door, Dastmalchian comes back looking terrified and starts peeking out through the curtains.

It’s a moment straight out of a horror film.

“Oh my God, my heart is racing,” he says. “A very mentally ill woman just came and told me that I’m her universal husband and she’s been waiting for me.”

When he told her she had the wrong house, she smirked silently until he was forced to close the door.

Dastmalchian runs to the street to make sure she’s gone before calling the landlord, only to find out that she’d stopped by his house first. “Did she ask for David?” Dastmalchian wants to know. She had not.

She must have been on drugs — Dastmalchian knows the signs well — but still, it’s weird, and he has had a stalker before.

“I think I’ve played so many people who are mentally ill that [fans] tend to respond to me in a really strong way,” he says.

He takes some deep breaths: “I think my initial fear is subsiding. I think we’re safe.”

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By the time Dastmalchian got sober in his mid-20s, he was sure he’d missed his shot. “I robbed myself of prime years for an actor,” he says. He lived in a halfway house and worked odd jobs. His favorite was ushering and working concessions at a Chicago movie theater, where he’d chain smoke and watch films with the projectionists.

It was there that a couple of theater-director friends saw him and persuaded him to get back onstage. To his surprise, he was a much better actor sober.

He’d just gotten his biggest on-screen credit, in a Cingular Wireless commercial, when he joined every other character actor in Chicago at a cattle-call audition for “The Dark Knight.” He was devastated when he didn’t get cast as one of the Joker’s henchmen in the opening heist scene.

Then four months later, on a day he was heading to the unemployment office, he got a phone call. “Little did I know that they had saved a much cooler role for me and it changed my life,” he says. He’d be playing a deranged Joker fanboy who can only giggle as Aaron Eckhart’s Harvey Dent shoves a gun into his forehead. The feeling of being on that enormous set, in the company of great actors gave him the fuel that’s carried him through all the Weirdo No. 7 roles that followed: “All you need is one person, somebody just saying, ‘Yes, you belong here. Come on in,’” he says.

The most rewarding experiences of Dastmalchian’s life, he says, are when he’s had the courage to face down his fears — which is a good thing to know about yourself, because he was racked with anxiety in 2021 as he headed to Melbourne to shoot “Late Night With the Devil.” The 1977 world of Jack Delroy, says Dastmalchian, “hinges on how well the guy at the center of the story can pull off being not only a talk-show host but a man who’s on the verge of a dissociative psychotic nervous breakdown.”

The Cairnes brothers, though, had no doubt about Dastmalchian’s abilities. They’d written him a personal letter after reading an essay he’d written in Fangoria about the comfort he’d found in the horror hosts he’d adored as a kid after his mother’s death during covid. They loved how he “is utterly compelling in everything he does, whatever the genre and however big or small the role,” says Colin Cairnes by email.

In Dastmalchian’s hands, Delroy isn’t just a comedian with a dark side, but something more frightening: a charming, ruthlessly ambitious man with nothing but emptiness beneath his mask. And there’s more horror from Dastmalchian to come. Up next, he’s in “Dust Bunny,” a horror-comedy about a little girl seeking revenge on the monster under her bed, and “The Life of Chuck,” a Stephen King adaptation about the end of the world.

“I’m building this little circus of like-minded artists where we’re trying to create genre stories that wrestle with the complicated things that I think are interesting about life,” he says.

But mostly, he’s just staring into the void and enjoying the view.

correction

An earlier version of this article stated that David Dastmalchian was from Kansas City, Mo. He is from Kansas City, Kan. In addition, he was 19, not 24, when he first tried heroin. The article has been updated.

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